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Friday, March 1, 2019

Retrospective #13: Is Our Diet Really Changing?

How, you might ask,
can we reliably determine or measure if our diet is really changing for the
better in a meaningful way. Consumer food questionnaires are reliably
unreliable and therefore useless. And most other “surveys” are suspect because
they are funded by vested interests. The method I’ll use here is to see, over
the years – especially recent years – if the Dietary Guidelines have changed, ever
so slightly, for better or worse.

In December 2014,
the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, appointed by the USDA/HHS, wrote, “Dietary
Cholesterol is no longer a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.” This happened after this column first appeared in 2011, and this nugget didn’t
make it in verbatim,
but the 2015 Guidelines did drop the
300mg of dietary cholesterol daily maximum recommended in all previous Guidelines.
A single egg yolk has 212mg of cholesterol. Whole eggs contain all of the
essential amino acids for humans (and chicks). Loaded with vitamins and
minerals, whole eggs are an inexpensive source of both fat and protein. And pastured egg
sales are on the rise.

Since their
inception in 1980 the Guidelines have always recommended that our diet be
mostly carbohydrates and therefore mostly plant-based. Plants are carbs,
mostly. Animal foods are, mostly, proteins and fats – by definition, saturated fat. Saturated fats are
normally solid at room temperature. Most fats made from plants are unsaturated and liquid. A few plant fats
are majority monounsaturated fat, but most plant fats are majority
polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs). Seed oils, like corn, Canola and soy bean oil, misleadingly
called “vegetable oils” are mostly PUFAs.

From the
beginning, the Guidelines recommended we eat a diet, by calorie, of 60%
carbohydrate, 10% protein, and no more
than30% fat, mostly plant-based,
unsaturated fats (oils). On the Nutrition Facts panel on processed foods, for
women this amounts to a daily dose of 300g of carbs (1,200kcal), 50g of protein
(200kcal) and +/-67g (600kcal) of fat, on 2,000kcal a day. For men it’s 375g of
carbs (1,500kcal), 62.5g protein (250kcal) and 83g (750kcal) of fat.

In reality, most
people were not eating a mostly plant-based diet. As omnivores, we actually ate
a diet that was about 15% protein, 55% carbohydrate and 30% fat, including, as
meat-eaters, both saturated and unsaturated fat.

The problem with
those plant-based guidelines are 2-fold: As we know, commercial feed lots
fatten beef by feeding them carbs (corn). And corn and other carbs, when they
comprise 55 to 60% of our human diet,
make us fat too. But if the percentage
from carbs needs to be lower, what’s a mostly-plant based Guideline to do?
Eating more protein is problematic. And #2, most protein is animal based, and thus
comes with saturated fat. protein is also more expensive, and a normally active
person doesn’t need more than 15% to 20% dietary protein to be healthy.

Well, again in
2015, in tacit recognition of their too-high recommendation for dietary
carbohydrates, with much lip biting, the Guidelines dropped the recommendation
to limit dietary fat to <30% of total calories, but doubled down on the
source of those fats. They strongly
recommended we eat plant-based polyunsaturated oils (PUFAs), and continued
their recommendation to avoid animal-based saturated fat – without mentioning its
cholesterol content.

But that was
progress. It recognized that, as a population, we should eat fewer carbohydrates,
especially refined carbs and added sugars. The 2010 American
Heart Association guidelines pointed out that added sugars (note: all
sugars are 100% carbohydrate) should be limited. The 2015 the Dietary
Guidelines were not far behind.

And we all know now to avoid trans fats.
Margarine, as originally made, was partially hydrogenated vegetable oils aka trans fats. We ate margarine to avoid
butter, which is a mostly “saturated” fat (66% saturated, 30% mono, and 4% PUFA).
But, trans fats are still found in
baked goods on the grocery store, just below the reporting threshold.

The processed
food industry/big government cabal are now trying to lump trans fats together with saturated fat, and by association taint saturated
fats (as if they thought the public needed to hear it further declaimed!). So,
saturated fats remain the “bad boy” of fats. That will be the last major battleground
of Guidelines reform.

So, there’s hope. Butter
sales are on the rise again, and eggs from pastured chickens are in the
farmers’ markets. I even overheard a segment on NBC’s Today Show recently that advocated “eat fat to lose fat.” Now, I
ask you: How far off can the shift to real “healthy eating” be if mainstream news
is willing to promote a crackpot idea like that?

About Me

I was diagnosed a Type 2 diabetic in 1986. I started a Very Low Carb diet (Atkins Induction) in 2002 to lose weight. I didn’t realize at the time that it would put my diabetes in clinical remission, or that I would be able to give up almost all of my oral diabetes meds. I also didn’t understand that, as I lost weight and continued to eat Very Low Carb, my blood lipids would dramatically improve (doubling my HDL and cutting my triglycerides by 2/3rds) and that my blood pressure would drop from 130/90 to 110/70 on the same meds.
Over the years I changed from Atkins to the Bernstein Diet (designed for diabetics) and, altogether lost 170 pounds. I later regained some and then lost some. As long as I eat Very Low Carb, I am not hungry and I have lots of energy. And I no longer have any of the indications of Metabolic Syndrome.
My goal, as long as I have excess body fat, is to remain continuously in a ketogenic state, both for blood glucose regulation and continued weight loss. I expect that this regimen will continue to provide the benefits of reduced systemic inflammation, improved blood lipids and lower blood pressure as well.